In the metal production and deployment industry, materials such as construction steel and other alloys, need to be analysed frequently for house-keeping and quality control purposes. For example, it may be desired to identify the material or to monitor whether the material composition conforms to the specification.
Additionally, there is a growing requirement for material identification of actual components of a shipped product, rather than relying on general supplied material certification.
Typically, samples such as shavings or pieces of the material to be analysed are sent to a laboratory for analysis. This is expensive in samples sent and is also time consuming, further increasing the cost of such analysis and creating delays in production.